Vehicles, such as automobiles, light-duty trucks, and heavy-duty trucks, play an important role in the lives of many people. To keep vehicles operational, some of those people rely on vehicle technicians to diagnose and repair their vehicle.
Vehicle repair technicians use a variety of tools in order to diagnose and/or repair vehicles. Those tools may include common hand tools, such as wrenches, hammers, pliers, screwdrivers and socket sets, or more vehicle-specific tools, such as cylinder hones, piston ring compressors, and vehicle brake tools.
Modern vehicles have evolved into very complex machines with thousands of various parts that perform a vast array of operations that permit the vehicle to be operated by the user. Additionally, more and more vehicle operations that previously were controlled by mechanical interactions are instead being controlled by electronic control circuits and logic. As with any such complex machine, malfunctions may occur in one or more parts of the vehicle from time to time, including the electronic control circuits.
As a result, repair technicians must now rely on sophisticated electronic equipment to diagnose and repair vehicular malfunctions. Electronic tools such as data acquisition devices (DAQs) and vehicle scanner devices have been developed to interface with a vehicle and diagnose the sophisticated electronic equipment. DAQs incorporate various measurement functions such as voltage and current measurement probes to aid a repair technician in diagnosing a vehicle under test.
Vehicle scanner devices may be used to access electronic equipment within the vehicle under test. Modern vehicles include an on-board diagnostic port (OBD port) or a diagnostic link connector (DLC). An OBD port or DLC generally comprises a plug-in type connector that is coupled to an on-board computer within the vehicle. The on-board computer is then coupled to various sensors at various places within the vehicle. The sensors can report current operating characteristics of vehicle elements and/or sense the existence of a malfunction in the various vehicle elements. By plugging in an appropriate scanner device into the OBD or DLC, status or error codes can be retrieved from the OBD or DLC. These error codes may provide information as to the source of a malfunction in the electronic control circuits in the vehicle.
In order to further process data received from the DLC or OBD port, the vehicle scanner device may transmit the vehicle diagnostic data to another, more robust processing device, such as a display device. The display device may further contain a substantial database of information about the particular vehicle under test from which the data is retrieved, and may correlate the error codes retrieved to particular malfunctions and perhaps display further diagnostic steps that may be taken to diagnose the problem. Further diagnostic steps may include the retrieval of additional diagnostic information from the OBD or DLC port via the vehicle scanner device, or the measurement of vehicle attributes using the DAQ.
By providing the repair technician with detailed information for quickly diagnosing and repairing vehicles, vehicle repair times can be decreased, vehicle turn-over is increased, and as a result, repair technicians may reap increased profits from a same amount of garage space.